[Blindmath] A question about Microsoft Words equation editor

[Michael Whapples]

I think that's a question without a definite answer. A short response 
would be how hard do you want it to be.

Here's a bit more information so you can make up your mind on how hard 
it will be for you.

LaTeX is quite a different way of working to editors such as word, this 
is because LaTeX you are writing in plain text with special commands to 
tell it about most non-alphanumeric symbols and formatting (eg. \alpha 
for the greek letter alpha and \frac{x}{y} for the fraction x over y). 
As LaTeX can be written using any text editor you won't have menus to 
help you find the command you want (well some specific LaTeX editors 
may) so you will want a good resource which you can refer to when you 
need help.

To learn the very basics (eg. enough to use mathtype in the LaTeX input 
mode or for very simple documents where you leave most of the formatting 
to the LaTeX software to make a reasonable choice) I would say this 
isn't hard to learn. Should you want to go further and gain full control 
of the layout of your document, create macros to save typing, etc, well 
this does mean learning more and could be harder. Sometimes when trying 
to achieve something very specific you may not have clear documentation 
to explain it (this depends on how rare what you want to do is) and so 
you may end up piecing scraps of information from here and there together.

Also there are a variety of packages you can get to extend the 
functionality of LaTeX, obviously when using one of those you need to 
learn the commands those introduce. As an example, there is a package 
called beamer for producing presentations (an alternative to using 
powerpoint), but if you aren't going to produce a presentation then you 
don't need to learn about it.

I would certainly recommend learning some of the basics as some software 
uses LaTeX for plain text representation of the maths (eg. mathtype with 
LaTeX input mode, wikipedia puts the LaTeX source for equations as the 
alt-tag of the image, etc). If learning more would be worth it for you, 
it really depends on how much maths you will be doing in the future and 
if the way of working suits (it can be hard at first because you're used 
to word, but give it time it may grow on you).

Michael Whapples
On 07/01/10 02:31, Greg wrote:
> Hello,
> How hard is LATEX to learn?  I never heard of it before I joined this 
> list.
> Thanks,
> Greg Wocher
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Gardner" <john.gardner at orst.edu>
> To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" 
> <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 7:25 PM
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] A question about Microsoft Words equation editor
>
>
>> MS Word 2007's native math editor has a display mode that is 
>> quasi-accessible.  You'd need to add some symbols to your screen 
>> reader dictionary and be willing to put up with a ton of 
>> parentheses.  If you are lucky you might get somebody at Microsoft to 
>> help you a bit, but as far as I know there are no tutorials for using 
>> this math editor with a screen reader.  So unless somebody else knows 
>> of additional information, you'd be on your own.
>>
>> Frankly I would just install MathType and use it in MS Word.  
>> MathType is usable by a blind person if you know how to read and 
>> write Latex equations.
>>
>>
>> On 1/6/2010 3:28 PM, Greg wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>> I have some questions about Microsoft words equation editor:
>>> 1.  Is it accessible?
>>> 2.  If so is it fairly easy to use?
>>> The reason I ask is that I am taking a college algebra class online 
>>> and we have to use it if we do our assignments electronically 
>>> instead of handwriting the assignment.
>>> Thank you in advance,
>>> Greg Wocher
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>>
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